Pro-Iraqi government forces Thursday relaunched their offensive to remove Islamic State extremists from the city of Tikrit shortly after U.S. airstrikes requested by the country’s officials hit the area.

The seller's fingers dance across the stacks of discs crowding his table, his words racing as he foists one DVD after another on a customer.
"You should see this one, and definitely take this one," he says. "Oh, and I just got this one today. Brand new....

U.S.-led warplanes launched 27 airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria this week, officials said Friday.
The three-day attack by jets and drones was focused on militants in Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo; the embattled...

An Iraqi military helicopter has been shot down by Islamic State militants near the Sunni-dominated city of Samarra, killing the two pilots. The Sunni extremists also were reported on the verge of taking a western Iraq town from poorly equipped government...

Iraqi security forces backed by Shi'ite militias on Sunday broke the two-month siege of Amerli by Islamic State militants and entered the northern town, officials said.
The mayor of Amerli and army officers said troops backed by militias defeated...

The unadorned wooden boxes arrive lashed to car roofs or secured in the beds of pickup trucks, a steady procession of mortal remains on a doleful final journey to this holy city.
Only days ago, they were enthusiastic Shiite Muslim recruits who answered the call of their clerics to fight a Sunni Arab insurgency. Now they are coming home lifeless and broken — the victims of bullets, bombs and shells.
Each day brings the remains of dozens of young men honored as martyrs. First, they are given a...

In early 2004, U.S. officials called a news conference in Baghdad to trumpet an intelligence coup: an intercepted letter from the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq setting forth his vision while outlining his worries about his organization's ability to combat an improving, American-backed Iraqi security force.
A decade later, it is the United States' turn to worry as the successors to Abu Musab Zarqawi, that now long dead militant leader, seize territory from a woefully ineffective Iraqi army and implement his...

He looks more like a desk jockey now than a militant, his graying hair framed by rectangular glasses, his round belly protruding under a button-down shirt.
Ali Faris acknowledges that he got soft after the American troops he once fought withdrew from Iraq. He stored his weapons at home and became a receptionist. But the rise of a fearsome Sunni Muslim insurgency in Iraq and Syria has brought the 46-year-old Shiite Muslim father of four back to the front lines, into a transnational battle that is...

Muqtada Sadr Photos

Thousands of armed Shiite Muslim militiamen chanted and marched in formation Saturday in a massive show of strength, vowing to defend Baghdad from a Sunni insurgent movement that seized two more towns in western Iraq from government forces.
Followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, one of the United States’ most powerful adversaries in Iraq, heeded his call to fill the streets of the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City.
Some clad in black, others carrying rockets on their shoulders,...

AMMAN - Syrian jets bombed rebel-held eastern areas close to the Iraq border Saturday after Sunni fighters seized a border post on the Iraq-Syria frontier.
Five raids killed at least 16 people and injured dozens more when bombs hit residential areas in the town of Muhassan just over 60 miles from Iraq, a day after tribal elders in the town along the Euphrates River, pledged allegiance to ISIL.
The Syrian branch of the hardline Islamists, whose stated aim is to create a strict Islamic state straddling...

Clad in combat gear and marching in military formation, thousands of Shiite Muslim militiamen on Saturday vowed to defend Iraq's capital from a Sunni insurgent movement that seized three more towns from government forces.
Followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr heeded his call to demonstrate in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City and in towns across southern Iraq's Shiite heartland in a fearsome show of strength by the Mahdi Army, the paramilitary group that fiercely battled U.S....